


An unreliable narrator

by luna65



Category: Pink Floyd
Genre: Blink And You Miss It Slash, Explicit Language, F/M, Historical References, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, References to Drugs, journalist trope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:47:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29762619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luna65/pseuds/luna65
Summary: A memoir of questionable recollection...always on the outside, but sometimes offered a glimpse of the real and the true.
Relationships: David Gilmour/Original Female Character(s), David Gilmour/Roger Waters
Kudos: 2





	An unreliable narrator

**Author's Note:**

> This month there was a novel published titled _Lost Souls: a fictional journey through 50 years of Pink Floyd_ and I am reading it now. It's about a young man who happens to meet Roger and Syd in 1967 and eventually becomes part of their inner circle (and also a journalist). It's meant to be historically-accurate as well as fictionally-crafted, with a lot of research behind it, and besides being amused at the whole idea of what is essentially fanfic being proudly publicly-published (and of course a male journo would be able to get away with that), it reminds me that I wrote something similar back in 2011, and so here it is. I think this story holds up pretty well, actually, and I will say in my favor (and to satisfy my own ego) it's a bit more _literary_ than this novel I'm reading.

The first time I saw them I was just a dewy lass, as they say here. That’s a favorite adjective, you see, because everything is so fucking _damp_. I’m perpetually surprised I’m not growing moss or some sort of awful fungus.

It was at the Roundhouse, which is cavernous and drafty and on a good night you’d end up with splinters in your ass if you got tired or too strung out and sat on the floor. But I’d heard they never cleaned the floor so I avoided that option. Gods they were _loud_. I wasn’t a fan of the heavy rock, I liked music with words you could hear, like Dylan, or Simon and Garfunkel. But my flatmate insisted I go, she went on and on about how they were so cosmic and groovy. What I remember is they were all pale and spotty and didn’t smile, didn’t look at the audience, grimly bashed away on their instruments for what seemed an eternity, I couldn’t even figure out if they were playing a _song_ , cor blimey!

Yes, I know, I’ve never managed to get the pronunciation just right. But I’ve been here so long it’s like I’ve absorbed the slang by osmosis.

Sometime in the middle of the night they packed up and all attempts to pull them were summarily ignored, though there was a nice cluster of girls around all of them. The guys were hovering around the projectionist people asking silly questions. We’d missed the last bus and I wondered if we were going to freeze walking to the tube station. I remember the bass player grimacing at my flatmate and her cringe-worthy giggle, the keyboard player had feathery eyelashes worthy of a Biba girl and the guitar player was going on about shades of green paint. He didn’t understand why you couldn’t just crush leaves with a mortar and pestle for green to make paint. I remember thinking that was a particularly lucid line of thought for half-past three. He was very beautiful though, with those round dark eyes which seemed to see into your soul. They all spoke with painfully proper inflections, nice educated lads from the middle class.

In those days I rarely remembered how we made it back to the flat relatively unmolested.

The second time I was serving an apprenticeship - which was more like indentured servitude – for an obscure music paper called _hEAR NOW_ and the editor/publisher had sent me back to that rundown venue to see them once more, smugly assured they had outlived their usefulness since changing guitar players.

I had a different flatmate who begged along because she had a terrible crush on said new man. He was indeed – as she said – a carefully-styled Adonis. But I missed the other guy and his earnest naivety. The other did seem a more capable musician, and the band didn’t shamble about any longer. They played songs and saved the rambling for the end of the set.

Thus began my acquaintance, for when they learned I was a burgeoning journo they chatted me up, angling for a good review. I didn’t tell them I wasn’t even _allowed_ to write anything yet. My primary duties involved the fetching of tea and biscuits and the occasional curry from the take-away ‘round the corner.

So when people ask me about the Floyd, I always think back to that moment when David Gilmour looked into my eyes back at someone’s flat, and since I was half-drunk and utterly entranced by his obscenely blue eyes (if the sky could only _be_ that amazing shade) I nodded when he smirked and nodded his head towards an empty room.

Well, it wasn’t _exactly_ empty, as Nick Mason was supine and snoring somewhere on the floor. But Dave shrugged and put my hand down his velvet trousers and we forgot all about the drummer, as people tend to do.

It was another year or so before I _actually fucked him_ , but I’m a patient woman.

So you can imagine how I laughed, of late, when I read about the latest potential paternity scandal. Though if I were Polly I’d be equally mortified, but oh gods, the man fucked his way around the world, so what, in fact, can you expect from such a person?

Admittedly I was somewhat of a novelty, being a Yank, though it seemed you couldn’t swing a cat in central London without hitting at least one, the siren song of the _au courant_ having lured many of my countrymen and women to expatriate life. So it was easy for me to chat up the lads in the bands and they were all so pretty back then, in their tight pants and colorful shirts, shining long hair and angular faces. There was a peculiar glamour to the Sons of Albion, but especially the Floyd. They weren’t any more attractive than any other band, really, but they had a Quality. You couldn’t specifically name it, but you knew it when you experienced it.

But the birds, we were expendable and fluttering, what mattered to them was each other, the eternal push-me-pull-you of serious endeavor. Well, they were convinced it was _serious_ , English boys could be so grimly serious, bless them. Intensely magnetic, a constant orbit, murmured conversations, laughter like the movement of clouds. We were only the momentary distractions, the eternal fascination lay within the charmed square.

How many nights had I sat at the local ‘round the corner from Abbey Road, watching those two leaning into one another, leaning closer after a bottle or three, and sometimes the conversation _seemed_ to make no damn sense, and Thorgerson was there too, blathering on in his effeminate way (Englishmen are also the only ones I’ve ever known to act like the swishiest of queens and at the end of the night put the screws to their girlfriend or wife or some random bint they pulled) and we’d all stopped listening to him an hour before. It was like watching some wildlife show on the Beeb, eyes wide with voyeuristic fascination.

I could have sworn they were ready to kiss, sometimes.

Theirs was a slow but steady climb, always something new and interesting on the horizon: scoring a film here and making an album there, performing with a ballet troupe, playing to an absent audience in an ancient amphitheatre. And gigging, forever gigging, with grand suites and movements and films and props and lights…their ambition was heartening. When other bands had seemed to forget about England, chasing success and validation across the pond, the Floyd was always there to remind us of their pastoral fancies and introspective disquiet.

Why did I stay…well I stayed for them, of course. My career, such as it was, a matter of continuing to beg for scraps of opportunity, but because I knew them – it was known that I knew them – I was allowed to remain at the edges and get in a job here and there. But bragging rights in regards to my other subjects carried no currency. No…if anyone wanted the cache of knowing me, it was all down to them.

And it was almost a relationship I’d wanted to avoid. I couldn’t tell you why, just that I felt the pressure of the bubble, the closer I moved towards it. The barrier which only _appeared_ transparent. But there was truly no room for anyone else.

And if you were to ask me to be honest, some drunken night…a warm night, wherein the party raged on with people in the garden doing strange things and smoking strange things and talking bullshit and nonsense…I would say there was really only room for two. There were others who noticed this, who knew this, but we did not speak of it.

They always hired the cutest engineers, I must say. In those days, you see, the selection of staff at recording studios was moving away from that ancient notion of strictly scientific technicians. The up-and-coming engineers and tape operators were adorable long-haired boys who’d been in bands themselves, whose own ambition waxed and waned according to the caprices of their employers and clients. They wore tight pants and carelessly buttoned shirts and weren’t afraid to flirt because the bands were too distracted: drugged out and jaded, fighting, scheming – or god help them – actually doing their jobs.

Now _that_ was a radical notion.

People speak of Parsons in hushed and glowing tones now, but I remember when he was a shag-coiffed skinny kid loping down the hall from one end of Abbey Road to the other, shiny grin at the ready, though one could see he literally _burned_ with the desire to Do A Good Job. Most of them considered it good works, a holy vocation, and that’s why I say all of it mattered then: that hallowed music which still sells and plays and will never go away, not until we blow ourselves up or Mother Nature flicks her fingers and we are reminded we’re all just specks of dust upon the hide of this planet.

What was I saying? Oh yes, those lovely boys…

I’m getting ahead of myself. I first began to suspect something when Dave actually smiling declined my attentions to sit in the kitchen with Rog, that was…1970, I think? Before he met the missus, bless her. She was so _earnest_ about her causes and so forth, one of the very first vegans I ever knew. Usually the veggies cheated and I couldn’t take them seriously. But Dave, he knew he could count on me to accompany him to the pub for a steak. I’m sure she felt I was a horrible acquaintance.

Ha! When it came to the dangerous pursuits, the bad influences? I wasn’t even close. No, the one who was going to cast a long dark shadow was the more obvious figure in the landscape; and I’d swear on _my life_ she knew this as well.

_(fragment of a conversation circa 1971)_  
DG: Who the fuck made off with my drink?  
SB: No wait, what is the song?  
DG: No, no – let Rog talk ‘bout that. I came up with a riff and he said, “That bit there, that’ll do.”  
SB: That’s positively gushing of him.  
DG: (laughs loudly) Yes, Georgie has his moments of enthusiasm. Puddy, get me a fucking drink!

So now to a moment wherein they were poised to ascend. But not ’73, not yet. And still easiest to skew each other at a moment’s notice, over the silliest things. Roger telling Rick he was slower than a pensioner when it came to eating, in front of everyone...

(Wait, should I tell you about the time I fucked Rick? He netted so many women with a sort of helpless charm, but on purpose, you see.)

…and Rick just sat there and took it, wide stormy eyes and fluttering those lashes to die for, not deigning to recognize the advancement of bully-boy tactics. But everything was boarding school to Rog, he had no other reference for interpersonal relationships, it seemed.

That’s not to say I wish to paint him as a villain _completely_. They were all equally complicit in their own destruction, I fear.

Anyone’s predilections, however, were no one’s business. It wasn’t done to speculate or question people about who they slept – or didn’t sleep – with. But one could spy certain hints of attraction and intrigue. As a unit: a united front, a quiet cipher. But individually one could see beneath it all, to a certain vulnerability they could display to each other, but only one at a time.

Like the way Roger and David could sit together for hours, just noodling, just talking, or not. Communing.

I saw them as magnet and steel, endlessly attracted and yet their polarity equally repelled. And everyone wanted to know _that_ , the secret to such a distinctive partnership. Fuck if I knew how it worked, but when one of them would smile at the other, it was a beautiful thing. And it comes down to that, you know, the beauty of it all.

The beautiful moment. A series of moments, suspended in the amber of a bygone time.

When things began to go wrong, there’s a moment I’ll never forget. I had been invited ‘round to Brit Row on a gloomy day, pissing rain. I hated going there because it looked like a fucking prison, all that drab cold brick. I rang the bell and the caretaker let me in, asked me how I took my tea, and I climbed the stairs to the third floor. The combatants were playing snooker and David smiled in relief to see me. We hadn’t fucked in quite some time, since the sprogs came along, but he still seemed to want me around. Perhaps because I wasn’t so tempting now. He was trying to behave, bless him. Roger didn’t want him to abandon the game, made his usual passive-aggressive remarks and David turned to him with the weariest of sighs and instructed him to find someone else to bully.

“No one else can be bothered to fucking turn up, can they?”

My eyebrows shot up into my fringe. That was an interesting turn of events. We all tramped downstairs where a shiny-haired sylph of a guy was fiddling with a gutted console. David’s tech was on hand with a soldiering iron and his usual laconic commentary. Like all great techs, Phil was variously unfazed by the whims of Fate (and equipment failures). The other guy, though, was swearing a blue streak but in a tone of voice which rendered it oh so polite, it was adorable. I thought of trying to pull him, but then his girlfriend - a tiny thing with long umber tresses and a charming gap in her front teeth - showed up to bring him his toolkit. Engineers always possessed all kinds of bizarre widgets to assist in their fiddling. She couldn’t have been long out of sixth form, but there was something about him which inspired a wide-eyed worship of his competence, suitable for a young girl. His employers certainly seemed impressed.

We ended up sitting on the stairwell reminiscing about the summer they all spent in Greece. I’d come to visit, sleeping in the bath or some such nonsense. It was before the beginning of the end and they seemed pleased they'd moved beyond it, but – my thwarted libido aside – it made me sad. I remembered, then, their regard for one another. When they played backgammon it was always intense. David would never turn down the opportunity to compete against the only one he thought was worth the effort.

But now I could see he’d wearied of the game.

These are the things I think of, now, when I’m asked to recall what I knew. I don’t really know what I knew _exactly_ , only fragments, moments, intimations of a larger whole.

 _(fragment of a conversation, circa 1980)_  
SB: - what I mean to say is, I really don’t know **what** to think of it. It’s so big.  
DG: It’s easy to hide in it, I rather like that, actually. (chuckles)  
SB: Is this the thing which finally makes you faceless, do you think?  
DG: It would seem so, hmm? Did you want a drink?  
SB: No I’m fine.  
DG: I’m counting on that, dear. Someone should be fine, it’s certainly not –  
SB: - you?  
DG: Well…things. Things are strange.

Yes, they were. But sometimes strange is acceptable, strange is fascinating, strange is irresistible. Other times strange is just strange.

And it’s too bad, so sad, when strange became merely strange and not…what _they_ were.


End file.
